Mayor’s bold plan to cut S.F. emissions
Breed set to announce building rules as part of plan to erase carbon footprint by 2050
Mayor London Breed is expected to announce Wednesday that the city will set a more aggressive course for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, including requiring all buildings constructed starting in 2030 to be net-zero carbon emitters.
Shrinking the carbon footprint of the thousands of spaces that make up the city’s built environment is seen as vital to San Francisco’s efforts to become entirely carbon-neutral by 2050.
According to San Francisco’s Department of the Environment, 46 percent of the city’s carbon emissions can be traced to electricity and gas used in homes and office buildings.
“If you look at where our emissions are coming from, they’re coming from the energy use inside buildings associated with water, heating, cooling — the operations of our built environment,” said Debbie Raphael, director of the environment department.
To date, San Francisco’s green-energy policies have helped cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent below 1990 levels — the equivalent of taking around 400,000 cars off the road, according to the Department of the Environment. Notably, those emissions cuts have paral-
The mayors of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose have banded together to urge the California Public Utilities Commission to reject a proposal they fear could substantially raise the fees that people pay when switching their electricity provider from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to a cityrun program like CleanPowerSF.
On Tuesday, the mayors — London Breed in San Francisco, Libby Schaaf in Oakland and Sam Liccardo in San Jose — sent a letter to the PUC to express “substantial concerns” with a proposal the commission is scheduled to vote on Sept. 13 that could raise the fees for leaving PG&E by as much as 25 percent.
The fees are added to energy customers’ bills every month in perpetuity when they join cityrun power programs to repay investor-owned utilities like PG&E for older power plants and continuing contracts to provide power.
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is gradually enrolling city customers in its CleanPowerSF program automatically. The program uses a cleaner mix of energy generated from renewable sources. Customers can opt out of the program, however, which would prevent them from having to pay the so-called exit fees and stay on as a PG&E customer.
But the proposal to raise the exit fees, introduced by state PUC Commissioner Carla Peterman, “would reduce our investments in long-term renewable resources ... and hinder our efforts in local development and customer programs,” the mayors wrote, adding that the costs would be unfairly borne by lower-income customers “in disadvantaged communities.”
“CleanPowerSF is central to San Francisco’s efforts to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and make our electricity 100 percent carbon-free by 2030,” Breed said in a separate statement. “This proposal makes it more expensive for San Franciscans to choose clean energy over dirty fossil fuels.”